We now have 3700 students taking our Christian apologetics course. We began that ministry in 1960 working with prisoners in Indiana. We wrote a three-lesson apologetics course because a large percentage of the incarcerated people we talked to had lost or were struggling with their faith.
That basic correspondence course kept growing, being updated and revised to the point where we now have 13 lessons. John Clayton grades all of the courses, but we prepared a teacher’s guide for use in Bible school classes and youth programs. We quickly found that the course was too basic for many of our prisoner students, so we began a 13 lesson college-level course. We have offered that course for 20 years, and it is also on our website (doesgodexist.org).
We offer students who complete either one or both of our apologetics courses nine other courses that are Bible-study programs taught by other teachers. There are also contact opportunities with congregations geographically close to the students. All of these courses are free and postage-paid both ways.
We no longer offer the basic course online because of hacking issues, but we will mail it to anyone requesting to be enrolled. You can take the course online by simply opening the question sheet for each lesson, copying and pasting the answers, and emailing them to John Clayton. Details are on the website. Whether online or by mail, our courses are always free of charge.
DOES GOD EXIST? maintains a Facebook page with daily postings. We often get challenges and questions from atheists and skeptics or those who are seeking for answers. We want to share the following conversation from Facebook. The article we posted was about the way the tendons in the legs of various animals and birds are designed in a way that allows them to sleep while standing, hanging upside down, or perched on a branch. The article ended like this:
DGE?-…If a human falls asleep while standing up, it can be dangerous. It’s also very uncomfortable when we have to stand while we are sleepy. For some animals sleeping while standing comes naturally. It’s all a matter of design. Such a simple thing as the position in which we sleep is a reflection of the incredible design that is built into all living creatures.
SKEPTIC- Are you so willfully ignorant that you refuse to do any research?
DGE?- Please explain what you mean.
SKEPTIC- You talk about stuff like this like it’s some kind of universal mystery, but there’s already a scientific explanation
DGE?- If you read this again, you will not find any place where we said it’s a mystery. There are explanations for this and most of the other things that we have presented on this page. The few times when we present things which cannot be explained, it’s usually because science has not yet discovered the answer. What science does is to try to discover how God did it. I think that’s why God gave humans curiosity. Solving the “mysteries” makes life fun and challenging. The point we are making on this page is not that these things are mysterious. The point is that they show design and engineering–not merely random chance.
SKEPTIC- Science is not just a way to discover how your god did it. It’s a way to find out how, if, and why things work. Before you look for how Yahweh did it, the intellectually honest thing to do is to find out IF he did it.
DGE?- That’s a good point. Science does look for how things work–and why. The “why” leads us to the question, “Do the facts of how this works indicate that it could have happened by chance?” That leads to the question of, “Is it rational to think that this could have happened as a result of random accidents without any intelligent design or planning?” The more we see apparent design in the world around us, the more we realize that it takes more faith to believe all those “designs” happened by accident than to believe they had a Designer.
SKEPTIC- Prove it was designed. Provide evidence to back up your assertions
DGE?- You say I should prove my assertions. You might want to look back to see what my “assertion” was. It was that there is apparent design in the world around us. Someone you may have heard of wrote, “Biology is the study of complicated things that have the appearance of having been designed with a purpose.” Even biologist Richard Dawkins sees apparent design in living things. So you can say, like Dawkins, that the apparent design is only in your imagination and is totally the work of natural selection acting on random mutations. Or you can say there really is a Designer. I would suggest that design shows intelligence. I can’t prove that God exists, and you can’t prove that He doesn’t exist. All that we can do is look at the evidence and reach our own conclusions.
SKEPTIC- When someone like Dawkins says there’s a “design” they don’t mean some guy sitting in the clouds with blueprints of every species, they mean that different animals have special means of doing things to survive (stuff like horses having hooves and fish having gills). This is not proof of Yahweh or any deity.
DGE?- If your concept of the God you don’t believe in is “some guy sitting in the clouds”, then you have a very juvenile concept of God. I don’t believe in that kind of god either.
DOES GOD EXIST? maintains a Facebook page with daily postings. We often get challenges and questions from atheists and skeptics or those who are seeking for answers. We want to share the following conversation from Facebook. The article we posted was about animals that are ruminants (cud chewers) The article ended like this:
DGE?- …This system of digestion allows animals who are grazers to survive in the hostile world of the wilderness. The balance in nature between predators and those animals that eat plant material is critical. If there are too many herbivores (plant eaters), they will eat all of the vegetation. If there are too many successful carnivores (meat eating predators), they can wipe out all of the plant eaters. The Master Designer has given us a balanced system with many features to allow animals and plants to avoid extinction. Cud chewing is one of those features. Ever since Adam and Eve, human actions have often thrown the system out of balance.
SEEKER- I would call that adaptation or evolution and the fact that you mention Adam and Eve says this was penned by someone who believes in creation. If Adam was the first man on Earth shortly after the creation by God, then where did the dinosaurs come from? Still not had a decent answer on that yet.
DGE?- Genesis 1:1 says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” It does not say when the beginning was or how long God took to create the heavens and the Earth. The verse is undated and not timed. Then in verse 2, we are told that Earth was in place and it was formless and empty. Beginning in verse 3 we see a description of the stages of creation that God used to transform the formless and empty Earth into a planet that was full of life. Finally, on the last “day” of that creation, God brings human beings on the scene. The word translated “day” is the Hebrew “yom” which has four literal meanings in the Bible. It can mean a 24-hour day. It can mean the daylight portion of a 24-hour day. It can mean any portion of a 24-hour day. It can also mean an indefinite, but finite period of time. If you want to say that in Genesis chapter 1 it has to mean a 24-hour day, then you have a problem with dinosaurs and many other things. If you understand it as being an indefinite period of time, then any conflict between the Bible and science disappears. At DOES GOD EXIST? we believe that science and the Bible are friends, not enemies.
SEEKER- That still doesn’t answer the original question on dinosaurs. I have heard some say that the fossils we have were placed by “God” to test man’s faith, but I find this extremely hard to believe. Darwin is still winning. If there is an all-powerful God then why does he allow doubt? Why does he not simply show himself and remove all doubt? I guess a possibility is that if man was made in his image then like the man God too has died.
DGE?- When the Bible says that God made male and female in his image (Genesis 1:27) it doesn’t mean physical image. God is not physical. Jesus said, “God is spirit” (John 4:24). God is eternal and not subject to physical death. If the days of Genesis 1 are long but finite periods of time (as mentioned before), then dinosaurs would have been created on one of the earlier “days” before humans were created. (Probably day 5) Or perhaps dinosaurs roamed the Earth in that untimed period after God created the Earth in verse 1 and the time when it was empty and dark. Perhaps after a mass extinction. Many other creatures are not mentioned in the Genesis account–some extinct and some still in existence. The creatures mentioned are the ones familiar to humans. There was no Hebrew word for dinosaurs or other creatures that people did not know existed.
SEEKER- Definitely getting there now, but all based on “If.” Surely a day was twenty-four hours then as it is now and not millions of years. Also, it seems then that the Bible was written by man if the writer had no word for dinosaurs and never knew they existed. God surely would have had a name for them. I don’t understand if God does exist then why are we not born with this knowledge, why is it not a natural instinct like feeding from a mother’s breast at birth. Why would he want to give us doubt? Darwin still winning but I would so love God to win.
DGE?- There are other Bible passages where the Hebrew word “yom” translated “day” in Genesis 1 is used to mean an indefinite period of time longer than a day. (e.g. Hosea 6:2) If there were no word for the dinosaur in Hebrew and God made one up, how would anyone know what it meant? Hebrew is a language for human communication. If the people did not know what the word meant and had never seen a dinosaur, the word would be nonsense. We can know there is a God by the things he has made (Romans 1:20). I think we are born believing in God, and unbelief is learned. People in every primitive tribe in the history of the world have believed in “gods.” There is something deep in our soul that tells us there is something more—something beyond this life and higher than ourselves. It’s a vestige of an ancient memory of the Garden of Eden that we all long to find again.
SEEKER- Out of all conversations I have ever had on this subject I have to say you have been the one with answers that make any sort of sense. A vicar I once tried to discuss with simply said I must have faith and believe without doubting or questioning the Bible. My problem with that is the fact we mainly read from the King James version which I think Henry VIII doctored a bit. Darwin still holds a very strong argument though, and school did not help as one class was RE (Religious Education ) then the next class had a big poster of Darwin’s ape-to-man illustration. I so wish I could be an absolute believer without doubt as it really does give me one big headache. If there is a God, then can I be forgiven for having doubt or do those with doubt not enter into eternal life?
